What Practice Is

or, you become what you think about.

Those of you with small children know that they are often the unwitting barometers in the room.

My daughter Kismet is seven. Every few days or so we have a conversation about what we love most. Mostly she’s angling to hear me say that I love her more than anything else in the universe, because she’s my daughter and she’s seven. The day before yesterday I solemnly avowed that there was absolutely no one in the world, and no thing, activity, toy, animal or food, that I loved more than her. She screwed up her face a little skeptically.

“I’m not sure about that….” she said, smirking.

She’s a bit of a wiseacre.

“You don’t think dad loves you the most in the world?” my wife asked, helping me out.

“Nah” she said. “I think dad loves silence the most.”

Not what I expected to hear.

And not like I spend the entire day irritatedly shushing everyone.

Let me also be upfront and say that I do not force my meditative practice in any way on my kid. Because she is a relatively late sleeper (lucky us), I’m done sitting before she wakes up. She knows who the Buddha is, knows where my sitting area is, and a few times we’ve sat together for ten or fifteen minutes- a feat for a little kid. But during this entire time I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned silence as a value, least of all as the thing I love the most. Maybe I just don’t hear myself talk.

Nor do I believe in telling her anything about non dualism until she’s older. I don’t believe it’s appropriate to tell the young owner of a developing ego that their ego doesn’t really exist. That would be irresponsible. The task of a child is to develop a strong and independent self so that when the time comes they can successfully separate from the parent. Whether they decide to relinquish this self later is entirely their business. Besides, before ultimate reality wants to recognize itself as awareness, it wants to enjoy the play of pretending it isn’t who it truly is. It’s God playing all the cross-dressed roles in ‘As You Like It’ for fun. Before non duality can be established, there has to be duality.

Still, it’s interesting that she has caught on about the silence thing. Why is that?

This brings me back to the reason for practice in the first place.

My young self was not what you would call a calm or integrated person. I had areas of intense focus, such as the focus required during my training to be a pianist and a scholar, but outside of it I was a hot mess. A complete lack of any emotional guidance by my two hyper analytical psychologist parents guaranteed that I would slam into many walls throughout my late teens and early twenties.

The idea that I could simply check in with my feelings for their own sake and let them and myself simply be: to them this was the worst kind of self indulgent, intellectually lazy claptrap. According to them, everything in life was rigorously conditional, the reality principle was real, intelligence solved everything, and life was hard. Instead of fatuously feeling something, I had to analyze why my feeling had appeared and was being odious and generally inconvenient (to them). Troubling feelings, in other words, should not be there in the first place, so I had to rationalize systematically to uncover what I had done wrong. According to them, a person who thought and acted correctly didn’t have to bother excessively with feelings. Especially ones that “annoyed” ( ahem, triggered) them. You also see this line of thinking in rigidly controlling religious households: “If you followed the rules set out by the lord, you wouldn’t be upset now would you?” It goes without saying that my parents weren’t stellar at feeling their feelings either (both of them were immigrant survivors of war), which is probably why they couldn’t abide mine. This is generally how this avoidant and repressive mess gets passed down through the generations. Feelings are threatening to the ego, so feelings must be rigorously controlled. It is like being taught to eat with your feet. And scolded every time you reach for the salt with your hands. I had a very extensive technical vocabulary for describing and controlling the self, but no means of directly accessing it.

It is not easy to go through your young life able to speak like a psychoanalyst but equipped with the emotional intelligence of a boiled sock. You sound pretty darn compelling until everybody realizes you are an emotionally stunted feral man child. When you aren’t allowed to feel your feelings, your feelings generally stay at around the age they were tamped down, which in my case was about seven. A very confused and bizarre seven, because I hadn’t had a normal upbringing till then either. I think this happens far more often than a lot of us admit.

So when I found silence, I latched on to it desperately. Some intuition told me that If I wanted to fully live a different sort of life, I had to silence my analytic mind and rid myself of the thoroughly toxic notion that I could think my way out of feeling. Silence is, for better or for worse, the only way to do this.

So this was my practice. The first five years was probably just spent in giving myself permission to actually do it. Me sitting there thinking “Is it really okay for me to sit here and do nothing?” “Aren’t I going to be punished?” “Am I really just supposed to sink into myself and let myself be?” “Won’t I just turn into a slack human vegetable spouting Eastern bromides?”

But then, as eventually happens, something clicked. Or in my case, a series of soft clicks. Focusing on the silence allowed me to tap into it. I began to really feel it. A faint, intermittent communication line was set up. Silence wasn’t terrifying. Emotions weren’t the enemy. Compassion wasn’t weakness. My defensive analytical frameworks could relax a bit. I didn’t have to keep reality at bay. Maybe I even had something in common with it.

I remember my mother making a rueful and very observant comment in my Montreal apartment years ago. Looking at my meditation bench, she said “That is the one thing you’ve had over the last fifteen years that you haven’t lost.” She was right. In a very real sense, my bench is my tiny tiny life raft. Just big enough to save my butt. It’s the thing I float over life’s eddies and tsunamis with.

So that is one reason I practice. But what is the other reason? Well, let’s get back to what my daughter said.

It is often said that what one thinks is what one becomes. This is often broadcast in the Norman Vincent Peale/ Tony Robbins corner of the self help universe. Their idea is more motivational and “me” driven. “Think it and you can achieve it!” But pretty much the same thing has been said in Vedanta, Advaita and Mahayana buddhism for thousands of years. Basically, they say that whatever you focus on the most in your life becomes the ‘flavoring’ of your world. It leaches out into the groundwater of your life. And this is the water that everyone close to you, for better or for worse, drinks when they are around you.

Focus on anxiety and worry, and people around you are imbibing anxiety and worry. Cultivate cynicism, outrage and hatred, you will be serving outrage and cynicism hatorade. We can’t help it, this is how we are set up as individuals and collective human beings. Whatever is ongoing inside of you is what people are subjected to.

This is why a spiritual practice is helpful. As is psychotherapy and other modalities of healing. Anything that opens up a completely clear, unconditional, receptive and open space of listening. Silence, in other words.

Now this isn’t as straightforward as it looks for two reasons. First, we aren’t very good observers of ourselves and how we appear to others, though we often firmly believe that we appear as we believe we appear. Human interaction and self awareness at the level of relative entanglement is very, well, entangled. Second, we can’t really change or find the self by employing the self. Everytime the self employs itself to alter the self, it simply winds up reinforcing itself. We wind up attempting to aggressively do something to ourselves instead of simply leaving ourselves be.

So what do we do?

Well, in my case I just sit on my tiny raft and try to cultivate a space of silence within my life. Is it working? I’m not entirely sure, but my kid seems to have noticed something.